Coaching Skills & STEP

TIP - We recommend reading Minis Curriculum and Session Planning & Design prior to this article.

COACHING SKILLS

This article summarises various coaching skills as highlighted in the Scottish Rugby Blueprint that you can use during the delivery of sessions. Remember APES principle should underpin your session and remain the priority so use these tools to help with your purpose but keep coaching time short and concise - refer to Session Planning & Design for more info on APES.

STEP

The STEP Model encourage coaches to change the space, task, equipment, or people for a chosen activity, to make it easier or more challenging. These four simple steps can be used to adjust fairly similar sessions to suit different purposes or capabilities i.e. you may not need to rip up your session plan, just think about adjusting using STEP.

SPACE - Change to pitch size, dimensions, starting positions or scoring zones to add a new challenge or make it easier.

TASK - Add conditions/roles on certain players e.g. can/not run/pass/score/tackle etc or set scenarios e.g. team A are 3 points down.

EQUIPMENT - Change the type/size/number of balls and/or use tags instead of touch etc

PEOPLE - Create overloads and underloads i.e. one team has more players

What Next?

Take a look through our handbook for further background, tips, material and sample session plans for reference. This handbook draws from multiple sources and reference the Scottish Rugby BLUEPRINT - Click on the below to download the full booklet.

Scottish Rugby BLUEPRINT 2022